James Cameron Has Prequel Plans For ‘Avatar 4’; ‘Battle Angel’ Could Arrive By 2017

It’s a little premature to even be discussing a fourth Avatar, especially when James Cameron is still simply writing his back-to-back second and third films. But considering the helmer is about as ambitious as they come, he’s already got a fourth movie knocking around in his mind. We recently got confirmation that this would be a long ways off, and the way Cameron’s schedule is looking, I would bet it’s a decade before we even see it, but we can know now what we might expect.

I have an idea for a fourth. I haven’t really put pen to paper on it, but basically it goes back to the early expeditions of Pandora, and kind of what went wrong with the humans and the Na’vi and what that was like to be an explorer and living in that world. Because when we drop in, even in the first film in ‘Avatar 1,’ as it will be known in the future, we’re dropping into a process that’s 35 years in to a whole colonization. That will complete an arc and if that leads into more, we’ll start, not imitating ‘Star Wars,’ but it’s a logical thing to do because we’ll have completed the thematic arc by the end of three. The only thing left to do is go back to see what it was like on those first expeditions and create some new characters that then become legacy characters in later films. It’s a plan.

Even as someone who enjoyed the first film, there’s not even a minuscule part of me that would like to see a prequel to the film, especially if it means chewing up Cameron’s future. With his commitment to complete atrilogy, I was hoping he’d jump onto different projects after, but it sounds like that’s not the case. However, producer Jon Landau did recently tell MovieZine (via Collider) that we could see the long-rumored Battle Angel around 2017 at the earliest, indicating perhaps Cameron would do the film before this prequel.

As for his back-to-back Avatar follow-ups, Cameron said he’s currently working with his team for the last two years “refining the whole pipeline” and added, “it was a hideously complex process to make [Avatar] and a lot has been said about that, but we don’t want it to be done in the same prototypical way as the first one, we want it to be a much smoother workflow just for creativity reasons.” Check out the video below.